First Contact - Colonialism Beyond Earth's Boundaries

Army engineer Eduardo Torres is caught up in the world's raging oil wars when he stumbles onto the plans for a quantum-energy battery. Forming a private army, Torres uses the device to revive an abandoned space colonization effort in an ambitious campaign to lead humanity to a new life in a distant solar system. But even as the feuding colonists struggle to carve out homes on alien worlds, they discover that they have not left their old conflicts and inner demons behind. Nor are they alone on this new frontier.

In 1349, one small town in Germany disappeared and has never been resettled. Tom, a contemporary historian, and his theoretical physicist girlfriend Sharon, become interested. What's was special about Eifelheim that it utterly disappeared more than 600 years ago? Father Deitrich is the village priest of Oberhochwald, the village that will soon gain the name of Teufelheim, in later years corrupted to Eifelheim, in the year 1348, when the Black Death is gathering strength across Europe but is still not nearby. Deitrich is an educated man, knows science and philosophy, and to his astonishment becomes the first contact between humanity and an alien race from a distant star when their interstellar ship crashes in the nearby forest. It is a time of wonders, in the shadow of the plague.

Young Carmen Dula and her family are about to embark on the adventure of a lifetime -- they're going to Mars. Once on the Red Planet, however, Carmen realizes things are not so different from Earth. There are chores to do, lessons to learn, and oppressive authority figures to rebel against. And when she ventures out into the bleak Mars landscape alone one night, a simple accident leads her to the edge of death until she is saved by an angel -- an angel with too many arms and legs, a head that looks like a potato gone bad, and a message for the newly arrived human inhabitants of Mars: We were here first.

This novel recounts the first contact between the aggressive Prador aliens, and the Polity Collective as it is forced to retool its society to a war footing. The overwhelming brute force of the Prador dreadnaughts causes several worlds and space stations to be overrun. Prador Moon follows the initial Polity defeats, to the first draws, and culminates in what might be the first Polity victory, told from the point of view of two unlikely heroes.

Sent on an exploratory expedition to a distant planetary system outside the Commonwealth, an AI probe is stunned by the sudden materialization of an entirely new planet known as Quofum, populated by extraordinary inhabitants whose intentions are quite mysterious, in an interstellar adventure set in the world of PIP and Flinx.

"Come find what you have lost..." Heeding this cryptic message from deep space, the crew of the starship Restoration journeys from Earth to a distant planet, hoping to find humanity's lost genetic diversity. But with the human race on the verge of extinction from the twin horrors of plague and a mysterious scourge of dark matter, how can an alien world harbor any remedies for Earth's declining populations?

In the far future, humans occupy thousands of worlds and get along as well as we do on one but have found no signs of other intelligent life. Then a new world -- an abandoned, near-frozen place containing a megaplex of towers -- is discovered. The Comity government's Deep Space Service assembles an explorer ship and a selection of experts, including pilot Jiendra Chang, artist Chendor Barna, and history professor Liam Fitzhugh, to investigate. Enemies of the Comity are assembling experts, too, though their fortes are sabotage and assassination. The enemies are determined that whatever knowledge or wealth may be gained from the mysterious planet won't accrue solely to the Comity.